Eric Rachlin

I am currently a research scientist working with Dir. Michael Black in the areas of computer vision and machine learning. Our group's research centers on generating realistic 3D body models from 3D scan data, video and photographs. My work focuses on developing increasingly accurate models of human shape and pose, as well as web-based applications that make use of our body models.

Before working with Michael, my primary area of research was computational nanotechnology. As a PhD student at Brown, my advisor Prof. John Savage and I applied theoretical computer science toward problems in fault-tolerance and stochastic assembly. Ideally our work involved probability theory, error-correcting codes, and information theory, although the occasional computer simulation was also required.

2018

Present application refers to a method, a model generation unit and a computer program (product) for generating trained models (M) of moving persons, based on physically measured person scan data (S). The approach is based on a common template (T) for the respective person and on the measured person scan data (S) in different shapes and different poses. Scan data are measured with a 3D laser scanner. A generic personal model is used for co-registering a set of person scan data (S) aligning the template (T) to the set of person scans (S) while simultaneously training the generic personal model to become a trained person model (M) by constraining the generic person model to be scan-specific, person-specific and pose-specific and providing the trained model (M), based on the co registering of the measured object scan data (S).

Three-dimensional (3D) shape models are powerful because they enable the inference of object shape from incomplete, noisy, or ambiguous 2D or 3D data. For example, realistic parameterized 3D human body models have been used to infer the shape and pose of people from images. To train such models, a corpus of 3D body scans is typically brought into registration by aligning a common 3D human-shaped template to each scan. This is an ill-posed problem that typically involves solving an optimization problem with regularization terms that penalize
implausible deformations of the template. When aligning a corpus, however, we can do better than generic regularization. If we have a model of how the template can deform then alignments can be regularized by this
model. Constructing a model of deformations, however, requires having a corpus that is already registered. We address this chicken-and-egg problem by approaching modeling and registration together. By minimizing
a single objective function, we reliably obtain high quality registration of noisy, incomplete, laser scans, while simultaneously learning a highly realistic articulated body model. The model greatly improves robustness
to noise and missing data. Since the model explains a corpus of body scans, it captures how body shape varies across people and poses.

The statistical analysis of large corpora of human body scans requires that these scans be in alignment, either for a small set of key landmarks or densely for all the vertices in the scan. Existing techniques tend to rely on hand-placed landmarks or algorithms that extract landmarks from scans. The former is time consuming and subjective while the latter is error prone. Here we show that a model-based approach can align meshes automatically, producing alignment accuracy similar to that of previous methods that rely on many landmarks. Specifically, we align a low-resolution, artist-created template body mesh to many high-resolution laser scans. Our alignment procedure employs a robust iterative closest point method with a regularization that promotes smooth and locally rigid deformation of the template mesh. We evaluate our approach on 50 female body models from the CAESAR dataset that vary significantly in body shape. To make the method fully automatic, we define simple feature detectors for the head and ankles, which provide initial landmark locations. We find that, if body poses are fairly similar, as in CAESAR, the fully automated method provides dense alignments that enable statistical analysis and anthropometric measurement.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems